The Beautiful American
by Jeanne
Mackin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BLURB:
As
recovery from World War II begins, expat American Nora Tours travels from her
home in southern France to London in search of her missing sixteen-year-old
daughter. There, she unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous
model-turned-photographer Lee Miller.
Neither has emerged from the war unscathed.
Nora
and Lee knew each other in the heady days of late 1920's Paris, when Nora was
giddy with love for her childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated
mistress of the artist Man Ray, and Lee's magnetic beauty drew them all into
the glamorous lives of famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her friendship
with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children in
Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will
their reunion give them a chance to forgive past betrayals...and break years of
silence to forge a meaningful connection as women who have shared the best and
the worst that life can offer?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT:
I moved
through the doorway, overwhelmed by the synthetic florals and citruses of the
post-war perfumes. They enter the nose aggressively, fighting for attention
like unruly school children. What I most remembered about my own child was how
the long braid she wore down her back smelled of lavender, a single note of
innocence. My lost child.
Sixteen years
ago, I ran away. And now, my daughter had,
too, or at least I hoped she had, for the other possibilities were
unthinkable. But after months of
searching, I hadn't found Dahlia in any of those places where a young girl
might find shelter: not in the homes of friends in southern France; not in Paris in the narrow streets of
Montparnasse, the cafés and gardens and boulevards of those years with
Jamie; not in the orphanages that
sheltered children whose parents had not survived. She had left no trace.
So I had
come, finally, to London, to the almost-beginning.
Beginnings are like endings, never completely finished, simply receding like
the horizon. Here, in the doorway of
Harrods, one rainy morning almost two decades ago, Jamie and I had agreed that
we would leave England and go to Paris, and that if all went well, we would
marry and begin our family. I had told
Dahlia that story, how I had dreamed of
her years before she was born.
I had already
been in London for three days, walking the streets, asking hotel clerks and
checking registers at shelters, looking for her, fighting down panic and
dread. The boarding house where Jamie
and I had stayed had been bombed and so had the little pub where we had had our
noon fish and chips and pint. There was destruction everywhere. St. Paul's Cathedral had been bombed, St.
James Palace, Houses of Parliament. Half the population of London had been made
homeless. This was no place for a young
girl on her own, even one with papers and a little cash, for her papers and her
savings had disappeared with her.
Dahlia is
sixteen, I kept reminding myself. She
was tall and strong and sensible. She
spoke French and English fluently and could get by in Italian and German. She had good common sense. She had what she needed to survive, if her
luck held.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Jeanne Mackin
is the author of several novels: The
Sweet By and By (St. Martin’s Press), Dreams of Empire (Kensington Books), The
Queen’s War (St. Martin’s Press), and The Frenchwoman (St. Martin’s Press). She has published short fiction and creative
nonfiction in several journals and periodicals including American Letters and Commentary and SNReview.
She is also the author of the Cornell Book of Herbs and Edible Flowers (Cornell
University publications) and co-editor
of The Norton Book of Love (W.W.
Norton), and wrote art columns for
newspapers as well as feature articles for several arts magazines. She was the recipient of a creative writing
fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and her journalism has won
awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, in
Washington, D.C. She teaches creative
writing at Goddard College in Vermont, has taught or conducted workshops in
Pennsylvania, Hawaii and New York and has traveled extensively in Europe. She lives with her husband, Steve
Poleskie, in upstate New York.
Website: http://www.jeannemackin.com/
BN:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-beautiful-american-jeanne-mackin/1117225036?ean=9780451465825
Thanks for hosting!
ReplyDeletethanks for letting me visit!
ReplyDeleteJeanne Mackin, author of The Beautiful American
This sounds like a beautiful book!
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